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The rise of girl power and geek culture in ’90s teen flicks: column

The cinema of the 1990s is often thought of as the rise of smart indie films and auteurs like Jane Campion and Quentin Tarantino. A new TIFF series on ’90s teen movies makes the case for teen heartbreak, hormones and hijinks.

Clueless kicks off a retrospective of '90s movies at TIFF Bell Lightbox.

Conventional wisdom on 1990s cinema views the decade as a breakthrough one for independent film, the Sundance Film Festival and bold new auteurs.

Such vital directors as Jane Campion, Quentin Tarantino, Whit Stillman, Richard Linklater, Steven Soderbergh and Spike Jonze rose to prominence in or around the 1990s, and they’re still making significant statements today.

So it may seem counterintuitive for TIFF to look past all this and instead focus on another film movement of the decade, one not usually celebrated by cineastes. These are the movies of teen heartbreak, hormones and hijinks featured in Back to the ’90s, the “nostalgia-riffic” retrospective program starting Friday at TIFF Bell Lightbox and continuing through Dec. 26.

The series will screen 11 features on as many evenings: Clueless (Oct. 10), Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Oct. 17), The Craft (Oct. 31), Pump Up the Volume (Nov. 7), 10 Things I Hate About You (Nov. 14), Reality Bites (Nov. 21), Romeo + Juliet (Nov. 28), Can’t Hardly Wait (Dec. 5), Cruel Intentions (Dec. 12), Empire Records (Dec. 19) and Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion (Dec. 26). Times and ticket info are available at tiff.net.

All of these movies are more likely to turn up on a film buff’s list of guilty pleasures than a classic Top 10, but that’s not the point of the program, says Jesse Wente, the director of film programming for TIFF Bell Lightbox.

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He notes in an interview that the series follows an earlier (and popular) one celebrating 1980s teen films.

“Most of these movies are a lot of fun, and they may seem disparate or only have the connection of being about teens from the ’90s. But when they’re grouped together, you start to see other patterns or other sorts of ideas formulated.”

Some of these patterns provoke a smile, such as when you realize how many of today’s stars made their film debuts and/or star-making turns in supposedly disposable 1990s teen comedies, even if some of them drew inspiration from such literary titans as Jane Austen (Clueless) and William Shakespeare (Romeo + Juliet and 10 Things I Hate About You).

You have Claire Danes and Leonardo DiCaprio in Romeo + Juliet (1996), Ethan Hawke and Ben Stiller in Reality Bites (1994), Paul Rudd in Clueless (1995), Joseph Gordon-Levitt in 10 Things I Hate About You (1999), Jason Segel in Can’t Hardly Wait (1998) and Renée Zellweger in Empire Records (1995) as well as Reality Bites.

There’s some sadness, too, in realizing that some of the talent is gone or diminished. Brittany Murphy (Clueless) and Heath Ledger (10 Things I Hate About You) both died young and tragically, while Christian Slater (Pump Up the Volume) and Winona Ryder (Reality Bites) got into personal and legal scrapes that did no favours to their careers.

But there’s more to Back to the ’90s than playing “Spot the rising star.”

Wente says the 11 films illustrate a significant shift from teen movies of the 1980s, which were dominated by the generation-defining work of writer/director John Hughes (The Breakfast Club, Pretty in Pink, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off).

“I think Hughes was so much about personal identity, about the outsider finding a place or an outsider who is odds with the larger community and society,” Wente says.

“In these (1990s) movies there are still outsiders, but they’ve gained their own community. In the 1980s, geek culture was not at all in charge of the world, but by the ’90s, we’re starting to see the first buds of what will become the 2000s, when geek culture basically starts ruling the world.”

Films like Valley Girl comedy Clueless and witch coven drama The Craft illustrate another important development in ’90s teen films: better female characters.

“The films are more female-centric,” Wente says.

“The female characters are more fleshed out, and in a lot of cases they’re not seen through the lens of the male relationship. In a lot of the ’80s movies, the girls are often still objects to be obtained or to break into a circle of some kind and a lot of it still relational to the men.”

Wente believes women were better represented in teen movies of the 1990s than they are in the so-called young adult dramas of today, such as the blockbuster franchises Twilight and The Hunger Games.

“I find the gender politics regressive in movies like Twilight and The Hunger Games, whereas I think in the ’90s, in a movie like Clueless, they seemed more progressive. They were empowered in a different way than they were in the ’80s than it feels like they are now.”

Also fascinating about 1990s films is what’s not in them: Internet culture.

The public Internet existed during films made in the latter part of the decade, but it hadn’t yet become the all-consuming thing it is today.

There are cellphones but no smartphones. And there’s just a hint of the always online, self-obsessed (and selfie-making) society to come: Reality Bites has Winona Ryder making a video doc of her circle of friends; Pump Up the Volume has Christian Slater as a pirate radio prophet.

The 1990s was also the last full decade when moviegoers still had to go to theatres to keep up with popular films, which didn’t go to video as quickly as they do now and which weren’t readily available online, if at all.

And there weren’t people inside the theatre tweeting and texting while they were supposedly watching the films, Wente ruefully observes.

“Everything is so reactive and so instantaneous now, plus the fact that movies are just vastly more available now. I wonder if 10 or 20 years down the road whether a ‘Back to the 2000s’ retro would even be viable.

“I wonder if we don’t relate to cultural artifacts differently now because of social media, because of the availability of them. Will people continue to come to a theatre to engage with that? The ’90s were maybe the last moment where there was that old-style sense of nostalgia. Something has been lost that is truly lost.”

Peter Howell’s new Star Dispatches ebook, Movies I Can’t Live Without, is now available for just $2.99 at www.starstore.ca .

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